Last update: 1/2/2012
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This free search for Federal Election Campaign contributions only allows you to choose one campaign cycle at a time for each donor name search, but it allows you to view the source document which provides a complete address. The search results page displays the donor name, city and state, occupation, donation and recipient.
For a low annual subscription rate (a monthly option too) this product offers unlimited searching by name for giving history and a package of other items including limited wealth screening (batch and one name at a time) through DonorScape. It has a versatile search that allows functional use of its database, i.e., you can search by donor or donee or a combination of the two, etc. This helps with prospecting for new donors.
This vendor primarily offers a searchable database of funders for fee, but there are many free resources as well. For free you can look up a foundation and view a brief profile, IRS Form 990 filings, subscribe to e-newsletters including an RFP Bulletin and use online tutorials for their products. The funder search is exact so if you want the Pew Charitable Trusts and type "Pew Trusts" you will not get a search result. Just type "Pew" and you get three search results including the Pew Charitable Trusts. The fee services allow you to search for funders based on various criteria including funding category, geographic location, and type of gift. Check the site to see if there is a regional Foundation Center in your area.
Foundation Search BIG Online (both by Metasoft)
There is no free lunch with this vendor, but the offerings are impressive. The subscription has a versatile search that can look through full-text IRS Form 990s as well as its standard database fields. While there is no specific geographic giving criteria to search on, the city and state of grantees, where available, has been indexed so that you can search for foundations that have made a gift within a city and/or state. Grants made can be queried on and exported to a spreadsheet. It is a very dynamic and comprehensive product. BIG Online is not quite as impressive but lets you search on the top 500 U.S. corporations and other foundation datasets by keyword.
Free registration is required for access to search for operating nonprofits as well as funders and view their recent IRS Form 990s. There are also an e-newsletters and quite a few helpful articles. Fee services include the ability to search for names (i.e., staff, officers, and directors), funders based on criteria, and IRS Form 990s based on various criteria.
This Federal Election Campaign contribution website search engine is only for the current election cycle. Its results page displays the donor's name, full address, occupation, donation and recipient. It also has a dynamic map powered by Google. Searches can be made on the donor name, but also on all or part of the address.
You can search this database of gifts for free and see if your prospect name has made gifts, but you must buy credits to redeem the actual gift information. Subscriptions are also available and their pricing page is easy to understand. A free searchable database of private foundation tax returns is also available and NOZA has a serious library of training materials on prospect research that is free as well.
This site allows you to search for Federal Election Campaign contributions by donor name and by all or a combination of election cycles, but does not allow you to see the source document. This means you get only the results page which displays the donor's name, city and state, occupation, donation and recipient.
This database is searchable by numerous criteria including individual or company name and is free. If you want more details or want to download the data, you will be asked for a fee.
Once you know what kind of boat your prospect owns you need to place a value on it. This site helps you discover who else is selling what and for how much.
This vendor does not package its product with the needs of a prospect researcher in mind, but it is a trusted source for real estate data.
One search box finds individuals and companies who own planes. It is a government website and the search and results are free.
The real estate search may not be as versatile as Lexis-Nexis, but it is close and just as reliable and comprehensive. The subscription prices are low and the packages include real estate, people search, business and background checks.
You can search this site by name for airplane ownership.
While the coverage is limited to certain states, the information is especially helpful for New York city and the search can be on name or address. Basic membership is free and four free reports are available per day.
Christina Pulawski, a research consultant, maintains this list of links to county tax-assessor websites. More and more counties across the country have websites that allow you to search for property records by owner name and/or address. Christina's site makes it easy to find them.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's mission is to "protect investors, maintain fair, orderly, and efficient markets, and facilitate capital formation". The EDGAR database it maintains allows you to search full-text documents by keyword and you can also look-up specific companies. The documents filed with the SEC include the proxy statement (Form DEF14a), which often has information such as director bios and compensation, executive compensation and insider stock ownership. The site provides a tutorial and an explanation of all forms.
This partially free website provides a friendly interface for searching documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It often appears in search engine results pages when searching on your prospect name.
Continually improving itself, this site provides a market value estimate of residential real estate as well as other data about the property (square footage, arial and street photos, sale data, etc.)
These are free sites for finding birth dates that can be helpful, but should be checked against other sources.
Peter Wylie and John Sammis are the brains behind this brawny statistical modeling software. This for-fee service excels at data mining - searching the information already in your database for clues about which people are the most likely to make a gift to your organization, among other goals.
This is a product by Grenzebach Glier & Associates, a prominent consultancy. It is capable of wealth screening and data mining large batches of data as well as screening for wealth one name at a time. The joy for smaller budgets is that it offers the purchase of "credits" to be used for searching one name at a time instead of requiring a time-limited subscription fee.
An expensive choice, Lexis-Nexis for Development Professionals (LNDP) offers advanced searching options across a broad spectrum of public records sources. Its range of news media choices is steep and its real estate searching is very versatile. While an exulted player in the game of search, there are numerous alternative affordable substitutions.
While this is a for-fee service, the search results screen presented before you buy can be a great source of information all by itself. The prices are so incredibly low that if you were in a hurry before a prospect meeting there would be zero excuse for not buying. Your coffee probably costs more than some of its specials. Plus they have a 24-hour free trial.
This free service does a little bit "deep web" searching and is a great start to find clues on individuals. There are quite a few annoying teasers to paid sites, but overall it can be very helpful. Not so happy with the changes they made in 2011, but I will try to forgive them in 2012.
Ancestry.com is the proud owner of Rootsweb, which is the host of this free searchable database of the Social Security death index. Especially when cultivating older prospects, a quick check here can yield important information.
Think of something solid - like mountain of rock. WealthEngine is serious about wealth screening and they deliver a lot for their yearly subscription in the low thousands, from which you can add on batch screenings. For those organizations with frequent, ongoing individual major gift programs a subscription can make the research process much quicker and perhaps more reliable.
I am not always happy with the results from its search box, but when I use a search engine like Google or Yahoo! and the prospect name plus "zoominfo" as keywords, I usually get what I'm looking for. ZoomInfo does a good job of collecting information about people and presenting them in a nice "bio" format. What really drives me to them is that they cache their sources; like Google they save a copy of the source page from which they derived the profile. I find information here that is no longer available elsewhere.
The Chronicle of Higher Education has a free searchable database of the American Association of University Professor's Faculty Salary Survey. Sweet.
For a fee, American Lawyer magazine publishes law firm rankings including some salaries and profits-per-partner. However, feature articles and announcement articles often contain helpful information for free. Sometimes a search engine search on keywords like the law firm name and "amlaw" will provide articles from other sources that might quote specific data.
AMGA Dr Data -Cejka
Cejka Search, a recruiting firm, has posted the American Medical Group Association Compensation and Financial Survey results. Very nice. Except that they don't tell us what year the survey results are from. I do know that they have updated to their page since they posted the 2008 survey results.
Hosted by the Washington Post, "the Federal Workers Lookup is a searchable database of information about 1.8 million civilian U.S. government employees - most of the non-military personnel who worked for the government during fiscal year 2002, the latest year for which data are available".
The salary charts on this website are a bit patchy, but can be helpful.
These salary tables are for non-military personnel and are published by the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.
When your prospect's occupation is not covered by a professional association salary survey, this site provides an acceptable fallback position.
You can search this site to look for like businesses and franchises that are for sale.
Biz Valuation by Inc. Magazine
The 2010 Guide to Business Valuation published by Inc. Magazine is a replacement for the interactive guide they had previously. If you are really working hard to find a reasonable valuation for a private business, this might have some helpful clues for you. (Added 1/2/2012)
This product covers different categories including business, intellectual property, science & technology and market research. It is a fee-based subscription service and has a long history with business researchers and librarians because of its large source base and complex search capability.
Hoovers has always been a favorite for business research. It costs money but can save you a lot of time. It is an especially good resource when you are prospecting for new people. (added 1/2/2012)
A simple search interface and free registration makes it easy to find basic information on businesses, including Dun & Bradstreet data.
This free site provides comprehensive and easily accessible information on public companies. I like the easy navigation to and from my most used information such as historical stock price, company overview, insider information and SEC filings.
More than 100 years old, this directory of lawyers is a tried and true source for the basics on an attorney: law firm, practice areas, education, date of birth and more. The simple and free search engine is lovely.
Like MarketWatch, this free site provides comprehensive and easily accessible information on public companies. It has intuitive navigation and a clean presentation.
There is a business journal for most major cities and the local coverage, features and interviews are valuable sources of information.
While much of the content is reserved for subscription holders, there is still a lot of free content and features like the Deadlines for Grants Awards search engine.
Sometimes just knowing the economic climate your prospect is doing business in is helpful in assessing wealth. More and more this crosses country boundaries. The Economist is very good at this.
Long used by librarians and business researchers, this product offers complex searching options in additional to more intuitive search choices. It covers a significant range of news and business sources.
Besides great coverage of business and the people who make it happen, Forbes publishes all kinds of lists including the world's wealthiest people and the richest zip codes. Good stuff. Lots of it free.
This site offers a searchable database of many major news sources for a low monthly subscription fee. It also offers a free trial.
Sometimes you need to get very local to find the information you need. This link list to newspapers across the U.S. is very useful.
I am a huge fan of the Wall Street Journal's website. Without losing the lustre of its print edition, the website offers intuitive and dynamic views of information clustered around topics or news stories. Yes, much of the content is reserved for subscribers.
AIIP - Association of Independent Information Professionals
This association encompasses a broad range of information professionals in its membership including prospect researchers. They have a vibrant list-serv for members and a new blog that is open to the public.
International in scope, this organization provides a host of member-only and public information and opportunities for advancing the field of fundraising. U.S. chapters often have local meetings and educational options that address the needs of the local fundraising community.
This organization reflects the depth of knowledge and passion members have for both fundraising and research. Educational opportunities span from beginner to advanced and its Statement of Ethics helps keep researchers mindful of the delicate trust donors place in our not-for-profit organizations.
Fundraisers in the field of education benefit from this active organization that provides its own educational opportunities and many scholarly publications.
This is a fantastic collection of information on a wide range of subjects including fundraising.
Hosted by LaSalle University, the center provides educational offerings as well as free resources.
This free email group is hosted by the Association of Professional Researchers for Advancement (APRA). Researchers around the globe ask and answer questions about prospect research. In addition to current conversations, the email archives are a wonderful source of information. (Updated 7/14/2009)
This site is full of articles, presentations, and sample documents relating to all areas of fundraising including prospect research.
Peter has written a number of books on prospect research published by CASE and also provides free access to the numerous articles he has authored. His engaging writing style makes some of these complex topics lively and understandable.
The Florida Division of Elections maintains a free searchable database of election contributions, including a search by contributor name that allows you to choose additional criteria such as contributor address and a date range. You can search on all election cycles or choose one cycle.
The Florida Department of State, Division of Corporations maintains a database searchable by company, officer or registered agent name.
On the Manatee County Property Appraiser's website you can search by owner name and view property records.
Pinellas County Library Databases
With a library card you an access a number of sources online including NewsBank (major news sources across the country), INFOTRAC, and ReferenceUSA.
Delco
Library Catalog
Delco
Library Databases
The Delaware County, Pennsylvania Library system provides card holding members with access to a host of database subscriptions including among them the New York Times and Philadelphia Inquirer, EBSCOHost, and Business Source Premier.
The Pennsylvania Department of State, Campaign FInance Reporting website provides a search for state election campaign contributions by contributor name and allows you to choose among other criteria as well including address, employer and date ranges.
The City of Philadelphia, Records Department provides a search on the city's election campaign contributions by contributor name. Search results are in the form of pdf documents of the campaign reports, which can be downloaded and searched by keyword.
Philadelphia
Library
Infotrac-Phila
Library
The Free Library of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania provides card holding members with access to an impressive array of database subscriptions including numerous biographical, business, and news sources.
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